A Haredi man reads from the posters, known as ‘pashkevilim’, on a wall in the Bea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem. The pashkevilim are used to communicate news, opinions, and moral dictates from different rabinic groups within the Haredi communities. Gustavo Martínez Contreras|CUNY J

JERUSALEM — The streets of the Me’a She’arim neighborhood look like few places in Israel.

Men walk around its narrow streets in black suits and white shirts; pious heads are covered with hats of different material or shape depending on their denomination. Women wear long skirts and sleeves, their hair covered with wigs or the snood, a traditional head covering.

Women in full head-to-toe veils, the Frumqas, seem to carry with them the rejection of the rest of the community who sees them as something taken out of the Islamic world.

The pashkevilim are the posters that cover street walls with the latest news, opinions, obituaries and rabbinical mandates. Me’a She’arim is a traditional Haredi Jewish neighborhood, isolated from the modern world of secular Israel that surrounds it. Continue reading →

Amado Tlatempa during a protest before last year’s NYC Marathon. On Monday, he took the fight for justice for the 43 Ayotzinapa students to the Boston Marathon.

The demand for justice for the 43 Ayotzinapa students missing for more than a year took to the streets of Boston on Monday when Amado Tlatempa ran the 2016 edition of the prestigious marathon.

“It felt great because I don’t know anybody here but many students showed up through the race and screamed their support for our fight,” Tlatempa said in Spanish in a phone interview after the competition. “And that’s very positive because people know what we’re facing and what we’re doing to keep the issue alive.”

Like this:

Carlos Llamosa left Colombia thinking his fútbol days were over, but instead he wound up representing the United States in the World Cup.

Carlos Llamosa left Colombia thinking his fútbol days were over. Instead, he found a rich fútbol landscape that led him to the World Cup representing the United States.

It was a second chance.

Carlos Llamosa escaped the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by pure coincidence and thus continued on his improbable path to become a soccer star in the United States. Llamosa, then 23, was out for lunch when Ramzi Yousef and Eyad Ismoil pulled a yellow Ryder van into the public parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Llamosa was a janitor at the B2 basement of the tower, the same one where Yousef and Ismoil parked the van.As it was the custom every Friday, World Trade Center maintenance employees took a two-hour lunch break. The additional 60 minutes allowed them to go to the bank and deposit their checks.

“Any other day, I would have gone back to work. But it was payday and we went out for lunch to enjoy that extra hour,” he recalls. “I was barely walking into a Chinese food restaurant when I heard the bang.”

Story Description in 240 characters
Andy Cheng migrated from Taiwan to New York hoping to work in the photo film industry, but he never imagined that his love for photography would develop into a life of learning about unknown rituals, strange languages and bachata.

Story Description in 250 Words
Andy Chen runs Best Color, one of the remaining 1-hour photo studios in New York City. With digital photography now being the standard, he knows his business develops its last rolls of film after a 26-year run at 4509 5th Avenue, in Brooklyn.
A Bloomberg report on Census data found last year that there were only 190 one-hour photo shops in 2013, down from 3,066 in 1998.
He is also facing the wave of gentrification that are pushing out the old staples that held together neighborhoods. Yet, he’s not bitter about it. His is more melancholy than anything else.
Because when he closes his Sunset Park shop in May, he will leave behind almost three decades of documenting faces and rituals of this Latino enclave.
“Everything changes,” he says with a smile.
Everything, including him.
Just as Chen, 56, saw this neighborhood go from Puerto Rican to Dominican and then to Mexican, he learned the traditions of these once unknown communities, and even learned their language and how to dance bachata.
“¡Increíble!,” he exclaims in Spanish before bursting into laughter.
For this Taiwanese immigrant, his job became his life; his customers became his friends; his friends became his family. All arranged in a composition that soon will become a memory, just like the photographs that made him.

If you don’t know Lupita by now, the first thing you should know about her is that she is everywhere. That’s why I am almost certain that you have run into her somewhere already, although you might have not noticed.

It could have been when you were at the Mexican restaurant asking whether the red salsa or the green salsa would burn your mouth more. She probably saw you walking by on your way to the subway station as you tried to beat rush hour on the train. Then there was this time when you were at the dollar store getting cheap soap and seltzer. Lupita was hanging out in aisle 10 with lamps, mugs and wall decorations.

This has nothing to do with the omnipresence of la Virgen de Guadalupe—the Brown Mother of Jesus of Nazareth. But as a Mexican, and a man who looks for pleasure, beauty and truth in everything I run into, it is hard for me not to see her everywhere, even though I am not really a believer. It is just that in México you become Guadalupano even against your will. From novelas to fiestas, Lupita is everywhere.

All I am doing here is asking for your help. For the past couple of months, and with the help of a few of my best friends (yes, I happen to have a lot of friends, like three…), I started to work on a project that I had kept in a drawer for a long time. You know, I had a job. This project is ¿Dónde anda Lupita? (loosely translated as Where’s Lupita?).

I chose to use Tumblr because the platform allows for easy reblogging and cute heart-shaped likes. The whole idea is to capture images of Guadalupe wherever she is, from the markets of Bolivia to the boutiques of Tokyo, from a sidewalk in Gwinnett County, Georgia, to the town of Colonia, Uruguay. And this is where you guys come in handy.

Many of you have been wandering around Mott Haven or other areas of the city where the image of la Virgen de Guadalupe hangs from a wall or rests on an altar with candles lit to honor her. Just in the South Bronx there are at least two huge images on display outside area churches. The most notorious is the one outside St. Jerome’s Church on 138th Street and Alexander Avenue. That’s where believers will hold a party on Dec. 12 to celebrate the 484th anniversary of her appearance to the Mexican Indian Juan Diego on the top of the Tepeyac Hill.

If you happen to cover any of these celebrations or if you just run into la Virgen Morena (the Brown Virgin) somewhere, please snap a photo and send it my way with a one-line caption saying what’s happening, where you found the image, and when you took the photo. I’ll make sure to credit you and, perhaps one day, buy you some tacos and/or beers.

With the large Mexican migration into the United States of the last 25 years, she has made her way all the way up the East Coast, She was already in the West, that part of the country formerly known as México. Don’t worry, this is no history lesson (although many of you are in need of one).

But let’s just get a couple of things straight. I am not trying to convert you into anything. You believe what you want. And no, I’m not going to tell you that the United States stole land from México in the XIX Century: Don’t forget El Alamo.

Antonio Tizapa felt his legs could not take another step when he was just a few yards away from the New York City Marathon finishing line, but then he saw the photo of his son in the crowd.

“I was running very slowly because I had no strength and just then I saw his image; my brother was holding it and he hadn’t seen me. I approached and took it from him,” Tizapa said. “It was wonderful, being able to finish the race with him, with the support of the people, and that made me run faster in those last meters.”

Tizapa, 48, and about a dozen other runners in Sunday’s race were the foot soldiers for a local campaign to extend to the world of sports the call for justice for the 43 Ayotzinapa students forcibly disappeared in México on Sept. 26, 2014.